State of the art communications systems comprise a multitude of communication terminals and nodes connected by an interconnecting network. The communications systems provide facilities and services to users of the communications systems via their communication terminals.
Current communication terminals may have a plurality of physical access possibilities to the interconnecting network via access points. Physical access can be based on a radio link using a radio frequency part of the electromagnetic spectrum such as generally known under the acronyms WLAN, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, DECT, or Bluetooth, or utilise another part of the electromagnetic spectrum like infrared ports and others. These types of access are commonly identified as wireless or cellular access. Further, fixed line connections may form part of a communications system, utilising electrical, optical or equivalent means for transportation of information. These are generally known under the acronyms like ADSL, SDSL, cable-modem, LAN, ISDN or regular PSTN, and others, and are commonly identified as wire-line access.
Communication terminals having only wireless connection as physical access are identified as mobile terminals.
In addition to the physical access, a terminal may have a plurality of functional access possibilities towards facilities and services provided by a communications system, such as but not limited to switched voice call, IP based voice call, SMS, MMS, Internet browsing, and e-mail.
The communications system further comprises administration, charging and executing functions. The executing functions actually provide the facilities and services of the communications system. The administration functions register various items such as subscription of users to services and facilities, connection state of a functional and physical access of a user terminal, allowable quota for facilities and services, user authentication, terminal authentication, and passwords. The charging functions in the communications system register the actual usage of facilities and services, translate actual usage into amounts to be charged and forward charging information to billing systems inside or outside the communication network.
State of the art communications systems comprise multiple parties, which offer services and facilities to users of the communications system. These parties will further be identified as Providers. Providers deliver competing services and facilities.
When a wireless communication network is spread over a larger geographic area it is identified as PLMN (Public Land Mobile Network). Examples of PLMNs are GSM, GPRS, and UMTS. The mobile terminal having access via the PLMN is commonly identified as MS (Mobile Station).
For purposes of handling a multitude of Mobile Stations, a PLMN is geographically divided in one or more VLR-SA (Visitor Location Register “VLR”—Service Area “SA”). Typically, a VLR-SA may, in turn, comprise one or more LSA (Location Service Area). The division in VLR-SA is valid for all users (Mobile Stations). The LSA may only provide different access rights to a user. In general, a service area is subdivided into a plurality of smaller geographical areas, called service cells.
A user may also have a subscription to specific or dedicated geographical or service areas, generally identified as zones. A zone provides the possibility of providing dedicated services to a user and/or to adept execution of services and facilities or charging of them, for example, tailored to a specific user or group of users, for example. A zone may comprise one or more cells of the PLMN and a zone may reside inside an LSA. Examples of a zone of a user are called home zone and office zone. A home zone comprises a cell or cells of the PLMN covering the residential home of the user, and an office zone comprises one or more cells covering the area of the place of business of the user. Also temporarily zones may be established, such as for a festival or major sport events and the like.
Zones offer providers possibilities to distinguish themselves in offering of services and facilities as well as pricing thereof, for example.
The concept of dedicated service areas or zones is generally known in the state of the art, as well as implementations of the zone concept. A major drawback of the existing systems and methods is, however, that a plurality of services and facilities each separately keep track of mobile stations for establishing whether a mobile station is present in a zone and providing the corresponding dedicated services.
Therefore, there is a need to frequently interrogate administrative functions or nodes in the communication system. This provides an extreme and undue load on these administrative functions or nodes, like a HLR (Home Location Register).